higher education

Brent Ruben, Richard De Lisi, and Ralph Gigliotti, all colleagues at Rutgers University, combine their teaching, research, and work expertise into a volume meant to be a “guide and a resource” (xviii) not only for current but also aspiring leaders, and those in less formal leadership roles on college campuses. Preceded by a pithy foreword by Doug Lederman, editor of Inside Higher Ed, the work is both frank and optimistic, a common characteristic of Brent Ruben, a practiced author in reference works for higher education leaders. The Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis that constitutes the foreword sets a tone that pervades this book: challenges abound in the current landscape of American higher education, but informed and prepared leaders can respond to these challenges and achieve excellence.

The text is divided into four parts. Part One is an overview of issues, opportunities, and challenges faced by institutions and their leaders such as institutional mission (50) and diverse stakeholders (56). Part Two presents theories and literature in response to topics related to leadership like cross-cultural communication (80), and a “comprehensive leadership megamodel” (109). Part Three adds practical tools and applied models to the theoretical discussions of common issues alternating between effectiveness on the part of individual leaders and organizational effectiveness, one example being a tool for organizational review and improvement (181). Part Four, the final chapter, concerns the development of leaders in higher education.

The authors’ prescience is on display from the outset of the work when they address the query, whither another book on leadership? Leadership, after all, is one of the more hackneyed subjects in recent decades, no less so in higher education where storied presidents, politicians, journalists, prestigious faculty, and popular commentators have all offered perspectives on the state of higher education and prescriptions for a better way forward. While Ruben, De Lisi, and Gigliotti spend a notable portion of the text describing higher education as they see it, their aim is to provide practical resources to current and future leaders, and in this they were successful.

As such a resource, contingent upon the notions of developing competency- and communication-based leadership, A Guide for Leaders in Higher Education succeeds in providing accessible and useful resources to individuals across different leadership roles. While the authors took great care to ground their writing in case studies, hypotheticals, appendices, and applied models, at times it reads more like an introduction to a higher education textbook than an instrumental guide for those currently in leadership positions. As a midpoint between textbook and reference work, it is still successful at both and provides a clear and unbiased background to issues facing current leaders. For religion faculty in discrete or informal roles at their universities, the authors provide a distinctly helpful, perhaps overlong, review of leadership techniques, tools, and competencies. For current department heads and aspiring administrators, the text will assist in becoming conversant in the topics crisscrossing campuses and systems to better respond to today’s challenges.

“Stop telling your children that they are smart,” is the new rage in parenting advice. Research has demonstrated that praising children for their smartness tends to undermine their performance. Kids who believe that success is due to innate ability also tend to think that failure is caused by innate inability. When they encounter hard tasks, they are prone to give up and to view themselves, or the task, as inept. Nearly every college professor has experienced the frustration of such students, who often feel that their smartness entitles them to automatic A’s on every assignment, regardless of the effort, accuracy, or sophistication of their work!

In Are You Smart Enough? veteran educational researcher Alexander W. Astin calls upon college faculty to recognize that our institutions have helped to create this problem. Looking at the primary measures that colleges utilize to evaluate their success – standardized test scores, retention and graduation rates, course grades and GPAs – Astin’s central claim is that postsecondary institutions are more focused upon identifying smartness than developing it. College rankings, for example, are heavily weighted toward the standardized test scores for incoming classes. Course grades and GPAs mainly serve to mark students’ progression toward degree completion, to identify low-performing students who may need to be dismissed, and to aid in admissions for graduate and professional schools. Standard metrics do not assess the information core to colleges’ mission: what students learn and when they acquire the knowledge. Postsecondary education, consequently, has become more concerned with identifying and acquiring smart students than with developing students’ intellectual and academic capabilities.

Astin places much of the responsibility for this preoccupation with smartness upon faculty. While faculty often complain about the culture of entitlement that exists among undergraduate and graduate students, we create this culture through our admissions and grading standards, which imply that our job is to reward – rather than enhance – smartness. Many faculty view their jobs primarily as imparters of specialized content knowledge; we expect students to already possess the analytical and communication skills necessary to acquire that knowledge when they enter our classrooms. Astin claims that faculty preoccupation with student smartness is a product of our preoccupation with our own, as evidenced by institutional processes for hiring, tenure, and promotion. Just as colleges expect incoming faculty to be fully formed experts capable of displaying our smartness, faculty expect students to be sufficiently formed when they enter our classrooms.

Astin does not merely critique the institutional culture; he provides concrete guidelines for shifting our focus to growing and developing student learning. In particular, he recommends utilizing narrative evaluations in course grading. He also advocates expanding our assessment of student development to include the affective outcomes that are often central to college mission statements: leadership, citizenship, and service. He writes that colleges should pay particular attention to students’ spiritual development, given that a central component of the college experience is students’ exploration of their sense of purpose, their moral and ethical commitments, and their self-development.

Astin’s text is a significant contribution to the emerging literature critiquing our culture’s obsession with innate ability. It explores themes similar to those in Carol Dweck’s bestselling book, Mindset (Random House, 2006), but unfortunately does so with less substance and more redundancy. It would have been helpful if Astin had integrated evidence from educational and neurological research to support his core assumption that intelligence can be, and should be, developed among young adults. He could also have provided more substantive suggestions for changing academic cultures, with attentiveness to not only admissions and grading, but also to student support services, academic advising, institutional effectiveness, faculty governance, development, and alumni relations.

Overall, Are You Smart Enough? is an important and thought-provoking text for postsecondary faculty. While primarily focused upon undergraduate institutions, its central argument is just as relevant to graduate and professional programs.

edicatopm“[I]f we can shift our way of thinking from isolated interests to collaborative goals and ultimately to collective impact, we can change the world,” writes Jason E. Lane in his introduction to Higher Education Reconsidered (6). Changing the world is an ambitious goal for a book of essays, but the authors and editor are convinced that the systemic economic and social inequality in our society can be addressed through systemic fixes to higher education attainment with practical tools that address the pathway from cradle to career (107).

Read on their own, some of the essays seem to promote the idea that gathering and crunching data is a cornerstone of educational improvement. The book does not offer a direct critique of the present educational trend of data-driven assessment. However, the book may help teachers move beyond the rush to find quick fixes to education. The collective impact strategy it promotes is not easy or quick: bringing together a diverse group of leaders from various sectors to solve a common problem may be difficult and may involve finding unique strategies to address the problems at hand (12-13). The essay on change management by Scott Keller and Carolyn Aiken likewise moves beyond conventional wisdom and provides practical tips for successful organizational change (27-60).

This collection of essays emerged from a conference at the State University of New York. In many ways, it reflects the context of a large public university system. At first blush, this seems rather different from the typical smaller private institutions where many religious and theological studies programs are housed. However, educators and administrators in religious and theological studies face many of the same challenges outlined in the book. They may particularly resonate with the need for systemic change to resolve issues of inequality. Religious and theological studies programs are often plagued by a lack of diversity among those who attain degrees, despite institutional goals that point in more inclusive directions.

Adapting the insights of collective impact may be a helpful strategy for religious and theological education programs as they work toward identifying and promoting effective solutions to thorny educational problems in religious and theological studies. Undergraduate and graduate programs in religion and theology might work together across institutional boundaries to identify common educational strategies that contribute to student success. Faculty from various sub-disciplines of religion and theology might work together to identify ways to build students’ core knowledge.

The book suffers slightly from the uneven quality and topical range of its essays, but that is nothing new for books that are the products of conferences. Readers may need to exercise some patience with examples and parlance drawn from business, healthcare, and large higher education systems. Altogether, it is a helpful book. I recommend it to educators and administrators looking for tools to lead change in religious and theological higher education.

Teacher, Scholar, Mother accomplishes its stated goal – to re-envision motherhood in the Academy. The grim statistics facing women in the Academy who are (or wish to be) mothers are not mere numbers, but a lived reality for many, either personally or through the lives of colleagues. These facts mirror institutional, social, and cultural inequities that cause “the consistent talent leak in the professional pipeline” (Young, ix) which forces so many scholar-mothers to leave the Academy. While this grim reality may not be changing fast enough, the essays in this volume offer fresh and innovative perspectives that address these challenges with fortitude and vision; therefore, this book is a must-read for those in the field of higher education – administrators, male and female colleagues, teacher-scholar-mothers, and graduate students.

The seven essays in “Section 1: Motherhood, Feminism, and Gendered Work” explore the “pipeline problem” through multiple theoretical and disciplinary approaches. Andrea Hunt argues that the normative ideologies reinforcing separate models of gendered work need to change to integrative models which can “help lay the groundwork for a new model of academic life and work-family balance” (10). Tracy Rundstrom Williams’ essay examines the confusing rhetoric and divisive language on breastfeeding which can undermine women’s confidence. “Mama’s Boy” poignantly discusses issues of masculinity, mothering, and white privilege through an interview conducted by feminist scholar Catherine MacGillivray with her son Merlin, a conversation that continues with an added interlocutor – Merlin’s step-father, Jason Fly – in “Mama’s Boy II” (section 3). Erin Tremblay Ponnou-Delaffon turns to Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy on encountering the Other as a model to re-envision reading, writing, teaching, and parenting. Susan Iverson and Christin Seher’s qualitative study of mothers’ sabbatical experiences accounts for disciplinary distinctions between Humanities and STEM faculty and suggests that faculty professional development must consider needs of academic mothers in sabbatical planning. Brook Sattler, Jennifer Turns, and Cynthia Atman explore motherhood from an engineering design perspective as an opportunity for reflection and self-authorship. Dustin Harp’s essay critically analyzes how media consumption shapes our lives and understandings of gender and identity.

The five essays in “Section 2: Identity and Performance in Academic Motherhood” document case studies of teacher-mother-scholars. Sara Childers’s essay queries the performative alignment between the objects and actions of motherhood and scholarship. Reflecting on her own subject position, M. Cristina Alcalde’s piece engages literature on non-violent masculinities to develop theories to create a safer world for today’s youth. Allison Antink-Meyer shows how the epistemology of science can be a bridge to connect the historical gap between the culture of academia and family-life. Erin Graybill Ellis and Jessica Smartt Gullion’s ground-breaking study examines how graduate student mothers negotiate the conflicting roles of “good mother” and “good graduate student.” The final contribution in this section, by Caroline Smith and Celeste Hanna, argues that Betty Draper of AMC’s television series, Mad Men, should be recognized as a cultural icon rather than the world’s worst mother.

The essays in Section 3 give voice to topics frequently silenced in the Academy. Elisabeth Kraus poignantly shares her experiences to give new life to the narrative of stillbirth. Marissa McClure’s article “s/m/othering” addresses infertility and cultural constructions of motherhood through artistic practice and academia. Ama Oforiwaa Aduonum’s article, written in a mix of prose and verse, voices institutional and cultural biases that can support and also hinder mother-scholars in Ghana and the U.S. In “Dropped Stitches,” Martha Kalnin Diede weaves together stories of female monsters, challenges of motherhood in the Academy, and fighting cancer. Layne Parish Craig analyzes narratives on IVF and Assisted Reproduction Therapy (ART) that disrupt the heteronormative focus on infertility. The essays in the section are especially welcome as fresh approaches to underrepresented topics in the Academy.

Read as a whole, these essays are greater than the sum of the parts despite the fact that the arrangement of the articles seems extemporaneous – for example, the addendum interview by MacGillivray in section 3, and Ama Oforiwaa Aduonum’s article on identity and performance which would have been more suited to section 2. This minor point aside, Teacher, Scholar, Mother is a refreshing must-read that intelligently re-envisions motherhood in the Academy.

Stephen Downes, cofounder of the first Massively Open Online Course, or MOOC, once asked how many ways society actually needs to teach trigonometry (2001). Each instructor who teaches the subject must teach it anew every time. But what if there is an optimal way to teach the subject? Shouldn’t that be developed as a pedagogical artifact and made available to everyone? The MOOC promises the possibility that anyone with an internet connection can access quality instruction.

Rhoads’ book, MOOCs: High Technology and Higher Learning is a critical examination of the MOOC movement. The first half of the book outlines the history of MOOCs as growing out of the Open Educational Resource movement, as well as the institutions which stepped in to take advantage of MOOCs to expand educational brands and even make open courses profitable. It also outlines the split between the Connectivist-MOOC (cMOOC), which relies on individual motivation for self-study, and the xMOOC, which represents the scalable online arm of institutions of higher education and which often offers certificates of completion.

The book really shines in its critique of the current state of the MOOC movement. Rhoads argues that rather than being a democratizing force delivering free education to all, MOOCs have largely replicated inequalities in society. The MOOC movement has the ideals of democratization of education, but it has been dominated by a hegemony of elite schools such as “Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Penn, Yale, and Stanford” (104). He illustrates this problem using the example of a popular political philosophy course called “Justice” offered by Harvard’s Michael Sandel. When San Jose State University proposed offering a MOOC version of this course with Sandel delivering his lectures via video, the SJSU Philosophy Department objected. Their concern was that this created a two-tiered system in which students at elite universities interact with “rock star” (105) instructors, while students at public institutions watch canned lectures and whose work was supervised by faculty who were reduced to “glorified teaching assistants” (106). The scalability of MOOCs means that faculty may never interact with students, or at best may just serve as graders. Uncritical adoption of MOOCs also exacerbates problems of diversity in higher education, especially when one recognizes that the institutions creating MOOCs are less diverse than the presumptive adopting institutions. And finally, there is a false epistemological assumption that there is one right, best way to teach a subject, rather than allowing that there may be many different ways to teach a subject, each responsive to a particular social and cultural context.

Rhoads’ goal is not to suggest that higher education should abandon MOOCs entirely. He is aware of the potential in MOOCs for making quality education more broadly available. But he recommends a number of reforms in the way MOOCs are developed and implemented. Digital online learning may benefit from a combination of recorded lectures and publicly accessible online documents as well as intensive faculty support embedded within particular institutional contexts. This approach to MOOCs yields a hybrid model he dubs an “xsMOOC,” a “MOOC with extra support” (130). Contrary to the view that online learning should be pedagogically efficient, Rhoads argues that the best educational resource is one that is grounded in the context of the learners who will use it. In this way can MOOCs best fulfill their promise.